According to 2012 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics, each year, in the United States alone, over 200,000 playground injuries result in children's emergency room visits, with over three-quarters of those injuries being from falls. Approximately half of all playground injuries may be severe, involving fractures, internal injuries, concussions, dislocations and/or amputations.
To protect children from fall injuries, playgrounds have been required to provide safety surfaces. A safety surface may be required to underlie and/or cover a playground area on which children may fall. The area may typically be associated with playground equipment, such as swings, horizontal ladders and climbing equipment, from which a fall can be from an elevation several times a child's height. The safety surface may attenuate impact forces associated with the fall. Safety surfaces may be also be mandated by requirement, or recommended as “best practice,” for other playground areas and recreational areas as well, such as in zones along paths and adjacent to “whirls”/“roundabouts.”
The safest current playground safety surface material may be a loose fill material such as shredded rubber, crumb rubber, wood fiber, pea gravel or sand. Such loose fill material may not only provide a highly safe surfacing option; it may also be highly cost effective, being an option in which materials and labor of installation may be of relatively low cost. In addition, such materials as shredded rubber and crumb rubber may be environmentally friendly “green” materials, made from repurposed used automobile tires.
A drawback of such loose fill material may be that such loose fill material may typically allow relatively poor wheelchair accessibility. Wheelchair accessibility may be compromised because such loose material may provide poor wheel traction. Wheelchair accessibility may be compromised because wheelchair wheels may sink into such loose fill material and may become mired in the material.
The American Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that all public playgrounds and beaches be accessible to disabled people. Public playgrounds may include recreational areas at community parks, commercial childcare facilities, schools and condominium buildings. ADA standards may be extended to apply to other areas, such as nature trails.
ADA standards require a unitary safety surface such as one made from poured-in-place rubber or from thick interlocked rubber tiles. These surfaces are relatively hard and may not provide sufficient attenuation of impact forces to adequately protect children from falls. While these surfaces may rate high on accessibility, they may rate low on safety. In addition, while these surfaces may rate high on accessibility, they may rate low on cost effectiveness. Current unitary surfaces may be costly; in certain instances, the cost of a current unitary surface may exceed the cost of a playground's play equipment.
New ADA standards may proscribe the use of loose fill materials as currently practiced on playgrounds because of loose fill materials' typically low accessibility ratings. However, implementation of such ADA standards with current unitary surfacing technologies may result in more playground injuries, particularly severe injuries, with the outcome that ADA compliant playgrounds may sacrifice safety for accessibility.
In addition, elimination of the current use of loose fill materials and the installation, in their place, of current costly unitary surfaces may pose economic hardship on playground owners. The economic hardship may be particularly acute in cases where a playground may be an interim recreational area, such as during a facility's renovation or prior to a facility's move to a different site.
It would be desirable, therefore, to provide apparatus and methods for making playgrounds and related areas wheelchair accessible without sacrificing safety. It would also be desirable to provide apparatus and methods for making playgrounds and related areas accessible without sacrificing cost effectiveness. It would be desirable that cost effectiveness be maintained in materials and/or labor for retrofitting, installation and/or repair of accessible and safe areas.